Due to privacy laws that have stymied regulators, no one can say for sure how many CAFOs are in the U.S., much less how large the animal operations really are, says Inside Climate News.
“Thousands of industrial farms across the country release contaminants into the nation’s water and airways, but in many states like North Carolina, the public has limited access to information about them. Federal authorities can’t gauge the scope of the pollution, either, because in some states they have very little idea of the number and location of farms. This makes regulatory oversight weak and in some cases, nonexistent,” says Climate News.
According to the EPA, which oversees CAFOs through the Clean Water Act, there about 19,200 of the operations nationwide, an increase of 3,600 from 30 years ago. “But environmental groups say that number is probably higher, largely because the agency has been unable to get reliable and comprehensive information, thanks to patchy state regulation and years of legal pushback from the livestock industry to keep the information from the public,” says Climate News.
Last month, a federal appeals court shut down attempts at greater transparency, when it ruled that the EPA had “violated the privacy of CAFO operators by releasing information about their farms, which had been requested by three environmental groups through the Freedom of Information Act in 2013,” says Climate News.
In North Carolina, environmental advocates have taken the matter into their own hands, mapping out the state’s poultry CAFOs for the first time. There are about 3,900.